In other words, they could read for all the same reasons that we can now use computers. We don’t know how to use computers because we learned it in school, but because we wanted to learn it and we were free to learn it in whatever way worked best for us. It is the saddest of ironies that many people now see the fluidity and effectiveness of this process as a characteristic of computers, rather than what it is, which is a characteristic of human beings.

So much wisdom in this article. Data doesn't have all the answers, and schools are becoming more and more driven by data. Favorite quote: "Because guess what? If there is one thing that the data proves, it’s that our children are all different." And all children want to learn.

It is not up to our children to accept a disability label in order to “qualify” for an appropriate learning environment; it is up to adults to provide learning environments which are flexible enough to accommodate the natural variations in our children.

Lot of lots of good insights and emerging ideas here: role of neuroeducation, importance of passion-based learning, and learner-controlled learning. Also: “teaching young minds about neuroscience and neuroplasticity alone can have a positive impact on their learning” #heutagogy

"The National Academy of Science suggests it might be unethical to continue to use the traditional lecture approach when we have growing robust evidence from many different studies that other methods are far more effective.

As student loan debt surpasses credit card debt to leave many graduates unhappy, educational institutions have a moral obligation to provide students with a learning experience that gives them their money’s worth. Applying the latest findings from neuroscience into their classrooms is one way to do so." (By Raya Bidshahri - Oct 24, 2017)

Brain plasticity is a two-way street; it is just as easy to generate negative changes as it is positive ones. You have a “use it or lose it” brain. It’s almost as easy to drive changes that impair memory and physical and mental abilities as it is to improve these things. Merzenich says that older people are absolute masters at encouraging plastic brain change in the wrong direction.

Preparing a child for the world that doesn’t yet exist is not an easy task for any teacher. Step back and look at that picture from a broad perspective. What are the critical 21st-century skills every learner needs to survive and succeed in our world? What abilities and traits will serve them in a time that’s changing and developing so rapidly?

They want to be challenged and inspired in their learning. They want to collaborate and work with their peers. They want to incorporate the technology they love into their classroom experiences as much as they can. In short, they have just as high a set of expectations of their educators as their educators have of them.

How Are Educators Responding?

The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, (ACARA), have identified the following as the General Capabilities they see as essential for learners:

Teaching students good learning strategies would ensure that they know how to acquire new knowledge, which leads to improved learning outcomes, writes lead author Helen Askell-Williams of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. And studies bear this out. Askell-Williams cites as one example a recent finding by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which administers academic proficiency tests to students around the globe, and place American students in the mediocre middle. “Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform at least 73 points higher in the PISA assessment—that is, one full proficiency level or nearly two full school years—than students who use these strategies the least,” the PISA report reads.

I am slowly learning to embrace the struggles that students experience as they engage with authentic work. If I don't allow learning to be messy, I eliminate authentic experiences for students as thinkers and creators. I find it important to regularly remind myself that frustration leads to insights and that learning is not necessarily the equivalent of mastery.

The article is good, but what I really love is the term "messy learning" itself. So much teaching in school has the ideal of creating clairity and being systematic in every part of the learning process. But that is simply not how learning happens. We need to embrace the messyness!

There is an emerging opportunity to boost student achievement and improve working for teachers here in the U.S--and a huge opportunity to expand access to quality learning to every young person on earth.

Compelling, customized (I like personalized better, but it's not a "C")' connected, and competency-based lea earning will all be a part of the future of learning. And as learners become more independent and are given an environment that supports freedom of exploration, they will also become more self-determined. Sounds like Heutagogy!

There is an emerging opportunity to boost student achievement and improve working for teachers here in the U.S (and worldwide)–and a huge opportunity to expand access to quality learning to every young person on earth. That’s the most interesting and important thing anyone could work on.

===> The opportunity is to make learning more compelling, customized, connected and competency-based. <===

While textbooks are clearly not obsolete, schools like Lawrence Intermediate School are learning to adapt to the impact the Internet is having on students — and figuring out how to take advantage of what it has to offer. In the end, there is no single right way to get kids engaged in learning, but it’s clear that these kids, at least, who are working in a SOLE environment feel a sense of empowerment, confidence and maturity.

The actual title of this blog post is: "And on the sixth day..." The examples of heutagogy (also referred to as self-determined learning) in practice referred to in this post are impressive. Many teachers have told me that it isn't possible for young children to be self-determined learners. Others have said they are interested in using a heutagogical approach, but do not know how to start. This article provides a few answers. I am not a school teacher by profession, but I do volunteer work at the grade school in my town, teaching English to first and second-grade German children. Yes, it's challenging to use heutagogy in the classroom. But when you do, I find learners to be more engaged and excited about what you are trying to teach them.

Curating is about finding and selecting information in order to learn about a subject. Youngsters can be encouraged to do this pre-school. This motivational 21st century skill can be encouraged at home. with educational games toys and and books which stimulates interest. For example children can learn about science by interacting with Chemistry Lab; Horrible Science - explosive experiments; Newton's Cradle and Science Museum. By the time they get to school they are already full of curiosity and ready to increase their knowledge. Audrey curating for www.homeschoolsource.co.uk

Here's a short first-hand report highlighting how an 8th grade social studies class teacher (Terri Inloes) has fully leveraged the content curation potential to let her students dive, discover and make sense of topics (in this case social reform movements) that they had not studied before. All by themselves.

Here the steps taken to make this happen:

a) By using the Question Formulation Technique, the teacher prepared pairs of photographs representing each of the reform movements, one picture dating back to the late 19th century, and another representing where that social reform movement stands in today’s society.

b) After checking out all of the photos, students settled on the pair of pictures that most caught their interest.

c) They brainstormed and refined a set of specific questions, and then shared their thinking with the class.

d) With the feedback received they selected the topic which they would curate.

e) At this point students planned their research strategies. By using 5 different graphic organizers from the book Q Tasks, by Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan, students were allowed to choose the one that they thought would help them the most in planning their keyword search strategies.

f) Students were assigned WordPress blogs and provided basic instructions on how to use them to

curate and publish their research work.

g) Discovery and real learning kicked in as students proceeded in collaborative groups to research and document their chosen topic.

You can see some of the outcomes that this assignment produced right here:

Americans have long recognized that investments in public education contribute to the common good, enhancing national prosperity and supporting stable families, neighborhoods, and communities. Education is even more critical today, in the face of economic, environmental, and social challenges. Today's children can meet future challenges if their schooling and informal learning activities prepare them for adult roles as citizens, employees, managers, parents, volunteers, and entrepreneurs. To achieve their full potential as adults, young people need to develop a range of skills and knowledge that facilitate mastery and application of English, mathematics, and other school subjects. At the same time, business ...

Lisa Marie Blaschke's insight:

Excellent summary of 21st century skills and competencies needed to prepare learners for the workforce

It is a form of learning whereby students are “educated through first-hand experience. They acquire skills, knowledge and experience outside of traditional academic classroom settings. It includes more of internships, studies abroad, field trips, field research and service learning projects.” And with the advent of technological innovation, making use of various educational technologies and Virtual Reality further supports the goals of experiential learning.

To get a glimpse of the experiential/collaborative learning environment in true sense, let’s check out the video below as it provides a glimpse of experiential classroom activity conducted by Disney College Program.

All too often in many countries, students do not get the education they must have to prosper in the twenty-first century, and countries are not finding adequate numbers of the skilled workers they need to compete. But innovative education technologies are beginning to show potential in helping close the twenty-first-century skill gap.

Schools nowadays are required to learn faster than ever before in order to deal effectively with the growing pressures of a rapidly changing environment. Many schools however, look much the same today as they did a generation ago, and too many teachers are not developing the pedagogies and practices required to meet the diverse needs of 21st-century learners.

In response, a growing body of scholars, educators and policy makers around the world is making the case that schools should be re-conceptualised as “learning organisations” that can react more quickly to changing external environments, embrace innovations in internal organisation, and ultimately improve student outcomes. Despite strong support for and the intuitive appeal of the school as a learning organisation, relatively little progress has been made in advancing the concept, either in research or practice. This lack of progress partly stems from a lack of clarity or common understanding of the school as learning organisation.

schools should be re-conceptualised as “learning organisations” that can react more quickly to changing external environments, embrace innovations in internal organisation, and ultimately improve student outcomes.

Higher education — increasingly unaffordable and unattainable — is on the verge of a transformation that not only could remedy that, but could change the role college plays in our society. Can you imagine the benefits of colleges having little bricks-and-mortar overhead, of each student being taught in ways scientifically tailored to their individual needs, of educators, students and researchers being able to capi­tal­ize on global intelligence?

In other words, they could read for all the same reasons that we can now use computers. We don’t know how to use computers because we learned it in school, but because we wanted to learn it and we were free to learn it in whatever way worked best for us. It is the saddest of ironies that many people now see the fluidity and effectiveness of this process as a characteristic of computers, rather than what it is, which is a characteristic of human beings.

So much wisdom in this article. Data doesn't have all the answers, and schools are becoming more and more driven by data. Favorite quote: "Because guess what? If there is one thing that the data proves, it’s that our children are all different." And all children want to learn.

It is not up to our children to accept a disability label in order to “qualify” for an appropriate learning environment; it is up to adults to provide learning environments which are flexible enough to accommodate the natural variations in our children.

Due to the antiquated restraints of the education system, most educators are forced to implement PBL in a "course-based" manner. This means that the project occurs within the traditional discipline structures, where there may be integration, but learning is framed within grades and competencies. In addition, start and stop times, driven by the Carnegie unit, force teachers to start and stop a project for all of their students around the same time. What if PBL wasn't held to antiquated rules of time, space, and discipline constructs? In that ideal situation, students could be engaged in personalized projects.

As a homeschooler I have seen how well this approach works as O have has the flexibility to create projects to suit each individual child oF mIne. Many of the things they dihst aught them skills they have used at college and on the real world AND helped them figure out what they wanted to pursue after high school.

There is mounting evidence that complementing or replacing lectures with student-centric, technology-enabled active learning strategies and learning guidance—rather than memorization and repetition—improves learning, supports knowledge retention, and raises achievement. These new student-centered blended learning methods inspire engagement, and are a way to connect with every student right where they are while supporting progress toward grade level standards.

As I was looking through my Scoop.it listings I came across this blended learning option shared by Dennis T OConner. I like how the infographic addresses learning styles, student centered approaches and newer education trends like gamification.

Some cognition experts have praised the effects of tech on the brain, lauding its ability to organize our lives and free our minds for deeper thinking. Others fear tech has crippled our attention spans and made us uncreative and impatient when it comes to anything analog.

Anyone with children today can see the lessening attention spans firsthand, although I find that if kids are motivated and engaged their attention spans may even be longer. The studies on laptop light causing sleeplessness also seem to align with current thinking about the impacts of using nightlights in children's rooms. Perhaps the lessen is that the brain has an ability to profoundly adapt to its environment, and we need to consider to what degree we allow technology to influence that adaptability. For example, there are studies that indicate that reading books can help increase empathy. If children are reading fewer books because of shorter attention spans due to technology use, does this decrease their ability to empathize with others, and, if so, what actions can we take to ensure that this skill is learned in another way (e.g., using technology)? Lots of food for thought here...

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.